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With the transition of notification pop-ups to notification banners in iOS 5, Apple seemed to have overlooked a spot – the notifications that appear when you become low on battery. A new free jailbreak tweak dubbed LowPowerBanner by iOS developer snakeninny will let you change that, making it so you receive a banner notification instead of one of those iOS 4-style, intrusive notifications.

The banner-style notification is better for these kinds of alerts because it simply goes away after you’ve been notified. The standard way that Apple goes about informing you about your low battery percentage is obtrusive, distracting, and makes you manually tap the dismiss button to get rid of it; bothersome if you are playing a game and have to pause it at a critical moment to give the notification pop-up your attention.

I particularly enjoy the way that the developer used the alert icon in the banner to give it that important feeling. It fits the mood well.

LowPowerBanner not only gives you a banner to alert you of your low battery percentage, but it furthermore gives off a very satisfying chime that goes along with the alert suitably. Just like the original notifications, LowPowerBanner alerts you at 20% and 10% battery marks. There are no settings to configure for LowPowerBanner and it requires iOS 5 to install. I recommend this tweak for anyone trying to leave the old-fashioned notification system behind; since it's free, you have nothing to lose if you don't like it.

This is cool, but Apple keeps the intrusive notification (my opinion) because they want to make sure the user is aware of their battery percentage. If you're text messaging or on the phone, they want you to Dismiss to verify you're aware of this. I prefer the intrusive just because I want it to make me stop what I'm doing and theoretically force me to plug my phone in before it dies. Because if it does die, I'll find myself waiting 15 minutes for it to turn back on.

Why not just make it an option like every other notification? Individual choice is best.

I think things like this will make a jailbreak fan for life. Having control of things that get left out, or are deemed unnecessary.... Thanks to the Dev. I've already installed it in somebody else's phone! Thanks for the free part as well, but I would pay for this one!

has anyone else had this tweak making their message icon disappear? I downloaded the tweak this morning, resprung and got a blank messages icon. I switched to a couple other themes and it's the same thing. I then turned off all themes back to the stock Apple icons to no avail. I then uninstalled the tweak, resprung and now the icon is back. anyone else?